Work from anywhere culture to create new business opportunities for telcos: Vodafone Idea’s Vishant Vora – ETTelecom.com

By Kalpana Warrier on May 19, 2020

NEW DELHI: Vodafone Idea said that ‘work from anywhere’ culture along with contactless digital payments, education, and telemedicine will offer a significant business opportunity to the country’s telecom operators.

“The two months of lockdown has clearly demonstrated that a lot can be done without going to the office….many companies will look at that and change their HR policies. And that will create many new ways of working and new opportunities for us as a business,” Vishant Vora, Chief technology officer said during ETTelecom’s recent TownHall session. “Telcos will be the enabler for this new normal way of living for the society.”

“The world will change at the end of the lockdown. So, work from anywhere is going to come in a big way across all industries across all geographies,” he added.

The executive said that contactless payments space will grow significantly as more people will look at maintain hygiene and prevent the spread of the virus. Similarly, people will opt for services like telemedicine and e-education.

“Contactless payment as an opportunity will grow for us in a big way. That’s a significant opportunity for us as a telco industry,” he added.

Vodafone Idea is currently transforming itself with the help of cloud adoption and digitizing processes. Vora said that the cloud core network is proving to be a game-changer for Vodafone Idea and has helped it expand capacity rapidly during the lockdown as data demand surged.

“I don’t think with the traditional bare-metal solutions that could have been done as easily and as fast. So I think that has helped us and you know, it shows the scalability potential of the cloud services,” he said.

Vodafone Idea is creating a universal cloud and its compute platform can be used for a lot of other services to create new revenue streams as compared to the pure connectivity revenue stream in the past.

“In the past, people relied on telecom networks. There is a great opportunity for the industry and for us as a business to become a bit more than a connectivity layer. We can really become a platform,” Vora said.

Vora said that Vodafone Idea can create a very strong cloud computing platform tightly linked with its networks which can create new business opportunities. “If you’re going to be a digital business, you need to be immensely good at analytics. For analytics, the cloud is very important because you need to be able to scale up and down your computing capacity on the go. Digital, cloud, and analytics are driving a lot, a lot of the opportunities.